This is a collection of python tools to expose a pseudo tty (ptty) to file descriptors (and therby, possibly sockets), e.g., allowing for largely transport-agnostic "remote shells".

Although somewhat general-purpose, these tools are originally intended to provide a curvecp-enabled remote ptty. See below for examples pertaining to that use-case.

If invoked directly (i.e., not as a module) pttypipe.py will fork a ptty, redirecting stdin and stdout to and from it. If invoked without any arguments, an interactive /bin/sh will be automatically attached to the ptty.

This tool will redirect its stdin to a named UNIX socket and echo everything it reads from this socket to stdout. The socket will be created automatically in kernel memory, however its name has to be unique

usage: python socketserver.py NAME

This is the counterpart to the socketserver. It will echo everything it reads from the named socket to stdout and send everything read from stdin back to the socket

usage: python socketclient.py NAME

In one termial, do:

mkfifo to_ptty.fifo
cat to_ptty.fifo | python pttypipe.py /bin/bash | python socketserver.py SPAM >to_ptty.fifo

In another terminal, you can now attach the socketclient to the SPAM socket and enjoy your "remote" shell.

python socketclient.py SPAM

Here is how you might use these tools to rig up a simple SSH-replacement using CurveCP. Adapted from the CurveCP README:

curvecpmakekey serverkey
curvecpprintkey serverkey > serverkey.hex
curvecpserver this.machine.name serverkey 127.0.0.1 10000 31415926535897932384626433832795 curvecpmessage sh -c "python pttypipe.py /bin/bash" 

In another terminal, do:

curvecpclient this.machine.name `cat serverkey.hex` 127.0.0.1 10000 31415926535897932384626433832795 curvecpmessage -c sh -c "python socketserver.py SPAM <&6 >&7"

Tabe care that the "serverkey.hex" is accessible from the second terminal.

In a third terminal, you can test your "remote" CurveCP shell:

python socketclient.py SPAM

LOADS. I am serious, this is very immature software, by any reasonable standard

• My file-descriptor magic doesn't appear to want to work on FreeBSD. Fork me!
• socketclient.py and socketserver.py just agnostically copy whatever stdin/stdout says back and forth. Ctrl+C or Ctrl+D will not work as expected. (But will work as expected in the ptty if a pttypipe is connected to the socketserver)
• In the above example, if the process executing in a ptty is aborted, the client is sent into a busyloop and will only terminate if the server dies as well. Yes this is a bug, which I have yet failed to resolve. Fork me!
• Proper error handling is missing in many cases, mostly due to my own ignorance about what needs to be checked. Fork me!
• I am probably doing a lot of things wrong with sockets and file descriptors, simply by not knowing any better. Fork me!